The possibilities of tech are endless, but how does it go from being this infinite source of knowledge to an operation as simple as directing an electric current to your light bulb. This blog will guide you through your tech project’s planning phase, explain the difference between vision and mission and help you target both. By the end of this, you’ll have the tools you need to bring your project to life.

You are the brains of the operation. You’re responsible for the success of the lifecycle of your tech project. As such, the more organized you are, the more smoothly the project will develop. It’s beneficial to write as much down as possible; keeping a project journal would be great. That way, your adventure will be logged and can be a learning resource in the future, a reference point that documents your experience.

Your tech project is a unique expression of your personal innovation. Your vision is a unique solution to a problem that only you (and your team) can manifest. When it’s all said and done, what do you want your project to have achieved? What is its purpose? The answer to that is the foremost foundational thought of your project.

Okay, you know where you want to go, but how do you get there? The journey is the mission. Your mission is the path that you will take to get you to your desired outcome. Along the way, there will be checkpoints to let you know you are on track to reaching your goal. For example, ask yourself, “What can I successfully tackle in 3 months? What can I tackle in one month, one week?” You’ve now given your mission its first goal, and set up two checkpoints that will assure you are well on your way.

Let your vision guide your purpose, mission guide your strategy, and objectives guide execution. Remember the acronym S.M.A.R.T. = Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Set S.M.A.R.T. objectives early and often. What will that actually look like?

Consider your market. There are two key factors to consider in this line of thought: are you in an unregulated market? Or, are you in a regulated market? If your market is unregulated, then you need to be able to provide as much information as possible to your clientele. You are not only sharing your product, you have a rare opportunity to share much knowledge in this sphere of interest without coming off as a know-it-all. Take advantage of being the expert in the room!

On the other hand, let’s say the market is largely regulated like the real estate industry. There is a surplus of general knowledge and the public is mostly already aware of the specific service they need. Your job here is simple: find a problem in that industry, create your solution, and then Boom; your product is selling itself. All because you introduced them to a problem they didn’t know they had.

Resources determine success. You’ve got to have good rocket fuel if you want to shoot past the moon. For your tech project, your fuel consists of four key elements: people, finance, physical materials, and intellectual property.

Everyone in your project’s life cycle is important, from the conception team in the beginning to the customer in post-launch. You’ll need a dedicated team, that will include people in your company and even agencies or partners that offer services you may not have in-house. Keep in mind having an outside perspective on the health and growth of your project is helpful too and you may find yourself in need of an advisor or consultant.

No matter what industry you’re in, you have to spend money to make money, therefore, it is a good idea to have a little tucked away or a savings goal before you even start your project. Along the way, there will be opportunities to get that money back. There are several proven methods of funding. Indeed.com has a great article entitled 

 External funding from friends and family helps but can be limited, so look for others to support your project. Don’t neglect to reach out to investors, startup incubators, or community programs.

This will include hardware, software, and tools you need to build your tech project. A physical building is included in this and it helps to keep the team connected!

Intellectual Property is the intangible value of your enterprise, this includes patents and copyrights/trademarks. There are other forms of intellectual property as well. Certain tricks of the trade are kept in-house and form a repository of knowledge over time. Guard these carefully!

Remember those details and checkpoints we mentioned earlier? Now it’s time to bring them under the microscope! Your project can seem encompassing at times but don’t forget to take a step back and ask yourself some important questions to make sure you’re staying on track. Again, you need to be sure all the work you are doing is going to be able to provide tangible solutions to the problem you are addressing. How you validate that is done by checking your project’s feasibility, desirability and viability.

You have thought of the cleverest solution in ages, but if no one can figure out how to work your product, it means nothing. Therefore, your design is where all of your data is actually presented. Every reason you have accumulated to make your product the most viable solution for the current market should be expressed in the product’s design.

In the design stage, first begin by referencing all your customer profiles, and mapping out your customer’s journey. Members of your team can help craft functional user stories, and product reviews, they can also do some of the wireframing and high fidelity mockups.

With great design, comes the great responsibility of proper execution. If you can’t execute the plan as superbly as you designed it, you are doing yourself a disservice. But don’t trip, your execution plan can evolve to maximize your product success.

Find the critical path: what is going to take the longest, and divide the work accordingly. There are useful software tools to help you manage your tech projects like Asana or Jira. Project management software may be a worthwhile investment to help track issues, stories, and tasks, so don’t rule them out!

When you are completely moved into the building phase, it is most certainly imperative…to have fun and stay engaged! Employ teams to tackle your backlog so you’re not hit with a wave of forgotten responsibilities near the finish line.

Have regular meetings and encourage team-building exercises to keep morale and energy high. Be a learning resource for your team, not just a delegator. Remember, it’s always better to have a leader than it is to have a boss.

Okay, ready to hit the market? Not quite, the most important phase before launch is yet to come. Ever heard of pre-flight checks? That’s basically the list of tasks the pilots check before take off.  Your preflight check is Quality Assurance (QA).

All set, now you can take off! Spread the word, promote and get people aware of your product and the solution it provides! The launch of your product will lead to new growth opportunities so be ready to take in the blessings!

What are some of those new growth opportunities and how can you be prepared for them? You will soon have potential new clients and much more! All that work you’ve put in is about to reap serious benefits, so you need to be ready!

Let’s recap the whole thing. Your tech project’s lifecycle is synonymous with a rocket launch. At the beginning, you must align your vision, plot your mission and set checkpoints, then set yourself up to properly execute your objectives. With the proper research and validation of your concept, you’ll have your plans finalized and can begin gathering the resources that will fuel your launch. Next will be designing the instruments that will take you on your journey, a.k.a. your product. After the QA process, you’ll be all set for take-off!

Now that you have the kit to plan out your tech project. Go grab that project journal, freshen up on that research, and grab those tools to get started! Thank you for sharing your time with us and know that we will continue to be of service to you!  Our next blog post will address some key aspects of managing that star technical team because let’s be honest. We can’t do it all alone. See you next time!

Creating and Managing Tech Projects for Tech Casuals

Assuming you already have a website, landing page, or even web application ready to go, it's important to know what your end goal is when a user first lands on your website. For e-commerce brands it’s simple: provide a great browsing experience, and easy checkout to drive online sales, for consulting businesses it may be establishing credibility and getting a visitor to book an appointment. In any case, once you pinpoint your goal for the visitor in mind, you will need to craft a CUSTOMER JOURNEY that follows that objective. First, let’s start with the basics:

Did you find some outcomes that work well for your digital business? Great! We hope so, as having a clear idea of what the digital outcomes should be is the difference between a regular website and a GREAT digital experience. By knowing what the intended outcome is, your ability to grow your business is greatly improved; remember, starting with the end in mind will help steer the direction of how to craft your journey.

Crafting Your Digital Brand’s Identity, Customer Touchpoints & Presence

Building a digital brand is an important step in a lasting, successful digital project. There are multiple aspects of the brand to consider when it comes to marketing, but for our purposes, we are focusing on brand identity, identifying and crafting customer journeys, and ways to build your digital marketing plan.

1. Unify Your Branding Identity & Core Marketing Message

Does your brand have a unified style & message around its products/services and the impact it provides for others? Your core marketing message should be aimed DIRECTLY at your target audience, to be received in the best possible light. The more focused you are, the better the results.  A unified brand experience is when a 

brand creates seamless consistency across channels, including design, voice, and, importantly, communication

Additional Resources on Better Unifying Your Brand

2. Identify and Craft Customer Touchpoints In Your Business

Take a moment with a blank sheet of paper or whiteboard, and 

quickly write down all the touchpoints customers have in your business in 2 minutes or less

. A touchpoint can be defined as any possible interaction between the customer and venture, digital or physical. 

! Hopefully, by doing this quick exercise you can gather all the points where customer interactions are important to the venture. Here are a few common ones if you couldn’t come up with a lot.

These are just a few of the common touchpoints, both digital and physical. Your business may have more custom touchpoints but it’s important to list them. 

Now that you know which touchpoints are relevant to your brand, it’s time to start developing a FUNNEL for each touchpoint that all LEADS to the same thing, which is the sale/end goal of adopting your product/service.

Do you know which channel that your target audience frequents the most? If you do, start with this channel first, and worry about the rest later.

Customer touchpoints are all the interactions between your brand and the customer both online and offline. 

How you communicate with the customer is just as important as the action itself. Depending on where you find the majority of your customers, it may be useful to make templates, processes, and guidelines for your business to operate within at each touchpoint.

3. How to Build A Digital Marketing Funnel That Makes Sense

Ever heard of the adage “Keep it Simple, Stupid”? Well, the same thing applies to designing digital marketing funnels. The basics of the marketing funnel go as follows: At the top of the funnel (TOF) is pure 

. In a business or marketing, obscurity is our #1 enemy. If the intended target audience doesn’t know our amazing offering exists, then how can one expect the offering to succeed? In the middle of the funnel (MOF) are activities focused on cultivating 

. Note, that they are not quite the same, interest engages people from the attention generated at the Awareness stage, while desire focuses on convincing the customer that your offering that it’s the best for them. Interest leads to desire, which eventually leads to the last rung on the marketing funnel or bottom of the funnel (BOF), which is 

. The action stage is typically where discovery calls, proposals, and closing of the customer happen, while loyalty deals with how to keep customers as clients for the long haul.

During your discovery of potential leads for your offering, you may find out more information about the lead that makes them a qualified lead to continue prospecting or a non-qualified lead; meaning they wouldn’t be the ideal target customer to continue with.

Effective lead generation and capturing are a huge part of a digital marketing strategy. In this article, we won’t go super in-depth on how to go about generating leads for your business, but we will mention a few ways to get simple lead gen and capture running, that are relatively low-cost, & free to do.

Digital marketing is a multi-front effort that requires at least one activity in each funnel to successfully create a customer journey. The efforts should be consistent, reiterable, and measurable against your marketing objectives. It is important to remember that as long as these activities are done constantly, and are adapting to the market’s activities, you will reap benefits albeit may be slow to full realization. Creating content is easy, but creating content that people are engaged with is the bigger challenge. Here are a few pointer activities that you may use as you are constructing your funnel.

Assuming you’ve gone through your marketing plan and have at least one major activity planned for each stage in the funnel and scheduled regularly, you should now have a basic marketing plan that you can start enacting and measuring for results.

The important thing to remember about operating your marketing plan is simply: 

You can spend all day trying to figure out what the best strategy is, spend money and time, perfecting all of it, and then when it comes to execution of the plan, it falls short or is a dud. Why does that happen? Simply put: “You won’t know what sticks until you try it”. In marketing, you are constantly evolving your activities to drive attention, interest, desire, action, and loyalty.

Here is a list of helpful tools, and platforms to turbocharge your digital marketing efforts.

6. Act, Measure, Learn, Improve,  & Repeat To Digital Success

With everything stated here, it is important to constantly reiterate the digital marketing funnel, research new ways to discover new habits/traits about your target market, and evolve your marketing message to truly win customers on the digital front. Use very simple tools/methods to do your tracking, excel works great, and even pen and paper can do what you need it to when it comes to tracking all your objectives.

In retrospect, if you use a combination of tools, and methods mentioned here in this article you will be well on your way to creating a digital brand that works for your business. 

To stay tuned for more digital success strategies like this, follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn,  it means a lot!

One of the most important actions a new business can perform is creating it's very first website. After careful deliberation for days, building your perfect brand and its identity, you're ready to bring in visitors!

Before you embark on the wonderful world that is web development, it's important to lay down a few foundations to set your brand up for a successful digital presence.

Understanding your brand’s marketing goals along with it’s KPIs(link) will help plot a course for the actions you’ll take in making a marketable, engaging website possible.

Let’s say you run a new beauty boutique shop in the local Chicago area and you’re looking for ways to generate new leads, manage appointments, and connect with a wide range of clientele.

In the example above, the beauty brand’s main service offering is providing makeup, beauty, & hair care services primarily for women.

Depending on how niche your market is, you’ll have to tailor your public messaging to match the pain points your customer has and provide a solution to them that no one else has.

A well thought out website answers the 5 W's clearly, and effectively.

If you can answer those questions in about a paragraph or less that is usually the sweet spot. Remember, your mission, vision, and business pitch should be simple, convey powerful language that appeals to the pain point of your audience.

It sounds weird to have website “goals” but just like any other endeavor, websites are a living representation of your presence online. Many businesses think they can just create one website and leave it as is and hope that traffic will magically appear and drive new business. Unfortunately that’s not how organic traffic gets generated on websites. Just like any other marketing channel, it takes persistence and constant improvement/adjustments to keep the momentum going. How might I craft my website goals you wonder? Here’s a few pointers to get started.

, work backwards from the company’s sales, and marketing objectives.

Is the website’s goal to capture new leads, increase traffic/conversions, provide information, perform pre-sales for product, showcase work or maybe all of the above?

What are some tangible traffic numbers you expect your website to generate? Some important website metrics to keep track of are

Over time, how will my website evolve to meet my marketing strategy?

, determine how the marketing team will track those metrics. Google Analytics is great for this, but other website building tools may have their own metrics dashboard your business can use for tracking engagement. This gives you direct feedback from the digital marketing results.

, craft your website objectives and requirements to your target audience.

Now that you have a basic marketing message, plan, and way to track progress, it's now time for usually my favorite part, which is building the damn thing! Depending on the type of website you want to build, you should choose a layout / type that works best for your business

There are a number of popular website types you can choose from:

It’s critical for your website to support your business needs. For example, if you are running an e-commerce shop, you need a way to manage customers and the products you publish on the web. That’s where services like Shopify and BigCommerce come handy, they allow you to build storefronts quickly by providing a content/product management system plus website.

Content plays an important role in engaging your audience. 

Here’s a great rule of thumb: If your website doesn’t WOW or capture the attention of the reader within the first 4 seconds, then you will lose that website visitor (source https://www.makerobos.com/topic/ask-an-expert/15-seconds-rule-to-engage-website-visitors)

Content is a major problem for new businesses because they either lack the content marketing skills / resources, don’t commit the time to content, or otherwise. It is also difficult to create content when the business plan / venture is still very new and hasn’t fully formed all of its service offerings yet.

So how can I start generating content for my business?

1. Entertain, 2. Inform, 3. Inspire, 4. Engage, 5. Entice 

Great Content Does All 5 of these in some form!

If your goal is to provide every woman in Chicago with the best in beauty services then build your content around that audience and talk about things in context they might actually listen too.

It takes hard steady work to keep up with content every week, coming up with new topics/ content to engage but totally worth it! Content creation is a long-term investment with enormous ROI. 

Don’t let your eye off the ball, if it gets too much, try outsourcing the workload! Content doesn’t always have to exist in your mind, other people’s input is valuable in making the entire content machine work as intended.

You finally have your goals, great marketing content, & a sound strategy for your digital presence; now it's time to build it! In 2021, there are endless ways for you to create your first website, web application, or mobile app, but choosing the right solution for the right business is often the challenge. 

To determine the best route consider Time, Cost and Quality. Unfortunately, you can only have 2 of the 3 when it comes to building most projects, each combination often comes with a tradeoff. 

Depending on where you fall on this range, that will determine the best course of action in how you should get the site completed.

You have a couple of options when it comes to building websites.

Getting a domain is the first step in building your first website! The rule of thumb is to get a short and sweet .com domain for your business. Here are a few domain providers to start you off with.

Chances are, your perfect and ideal domain name is probably already taken so here are a few tips to get a good domain name.

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Creating and Managing Tech Projects for Tech Casuals

Crafting Your Digital Brand’s Identity, Customer Touchpoints & Presence

Getting Started With Web Development